Sales contracts emerge when a principal and an agent in amoral hazard environment cannot prevent themselves from renegotiating their contract. The renegotiation occurs after the agent chooses his unobservable effort, but before its consequences are realized. Unlike previous analyses, a contract...

Contracts adopted with later renegotiation in mind may take simple forms. In a principal-agent model, if renegotiation may occur after the agent chooses efforet, the principal protects against unfavorable renegotiation by "selling the project" to the agent via a sales contract. If only singleton...

We analyze how agents' present bias affects optimal contracting in an infinite-horizon employment setting. The principal maximizes profits by offering a menu of contracts to naive agents: a virtual contract - which agents plan to choose in the future - and a real contract which they end up...

Pay What You Want (PWYW) and Name Your Own Price (NYOP) are customer driven pricing mechanisms that give customers (some) pricing power. Both have been used in service industries with high fixed costs to price discriminate without setting a reference price. Their participatory and innovative...

This paper provides the first in-depth study of the organization of knowledge in multinational firms. In the theory, knowledge is a costly input for firms that they can acquire at their headquarters or their production plants. Communication costs impede the access of the plants to headquarter...

Recent studies investigate policies motivating consumers to make an active choice as a way to protect unsophisticated consumers. We analyze the optimal timing of such choice-enhancing policies when a firm can strategically react to them. In our model, a firm provides a contract with automatic...

The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to over-invest in their companies. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed at explaining this stylized fact, most of them focusing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows...

This paper analyzes optimal product lines when consumers differ both in their taste for quality and in their desire for social image. The market outcome features partial pooling and product differentiation that is not driven by heterogeneous valuations for quality but by image concerns. A...

Firms often set long notice periods when consumers cancel a contract, and sometimes do so even when the costs of changing or canceling the contract are small. We investigate a model in which a firm offers a contract to consumers who may procrastinate canceling it due to naive present-bias. We...

This paper shows in two ways that the degree to which free-riding diminishes the performance of deterministic partnerships may be less than has been generally thought. First, a necessary and sufficient condition is provided for a partnership to sustain full efficiency. It implies that many...